This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 34, Winter 1996/97.
Beth Ritchie is a long time Black feminist activist who has worked in the US battered women’s movement. Her study of the connections between violence against women and women’s imprisonment Compelled to Crime was published this year. She teaches at a college in New York and continues to do education and support work with women in prison. In this interview with Liz Kelly she talks about identifying as an African-American woman rather than a woman of colour, her work with Black women in prison, and the challenges this involves for feminist analysis, service provision and activism.
Liz Kelly Can we begin with you locating yourself and your work?
Beth Ritchie Well, I think of myself first and foremost as an activist — for almost twenty years now in the anti-violence movement — struggling with the issues of raising ethnicity as a compound issue of violence. Increasingly I have thought of myself as distinctively African-American; not so much the multiple ethnicities that we think of as women of colour. I have done that in part because I really do believe that violence is a different experience, and the rates may also be different [in different communities], but certainly the experiences are different. Also because I’m more and more convinced of the need for specific cultural responses. So my work is much more embedded in Black communities and Black community development politics. Being out as a lesbian in that context is very different than in other places, being out as a feminist in that context is very different from other places, but I see that as the locus of my work now.
Asking the same questions in new ways
Liz In seeking to challenge racism feminists have always said violence is not more common amongst disadvantaged groups, that the important difference was access to services. Why have you decided to look again at the prevalence issue?
Beth For very important strategic reasons we [in the battered women’s movement] had to use the ‘every woman’ argument, and it was important to raise public consciousness. But one of the consequences has been a very flat monolithic picture of who a battered woman could be. Many Black women that I know don’t fit that picture, and not only don’t fit that picture in the public eye, but also don’t fit that picture in terms of public policy. So things like ‘battered women’s syndrome’ don’t fit the experiences of Black women. There’s clearly a range within Black women, but when we say ‘all women’ that has really come to mean white middle-class women. So I think we have to undo some of the rhetoric that we used quite successfully at one time. Access to services is different, but I think it’s even deeper than that. I think the meaning that violence has, the way — not the way it’s physically felt, but the way it’s symbolically experienced — is very different. I’m doing some research with a Black women’s group, and we’ve done focus-group interviews with nine different sub-groups of Black women: adolescents; lesbians; senior citizens; professional women; women involved in labour unions. It’s been fascinating, and in each one they feel different from other Black women, and they feel very different from white women. They talk about distinguishing things like utilisation of the police, of public institutions, but also their relationships with men who assault them is different.
Liz So are you saying that there are particular differences which change what violence means for Black women, and that these are linked to race and racism?
Beth Mostly linked, yeah. For example, there is such rhetoric in the Black community about the protection of women in a very different way than in the white community. There’s a very popular T-shirt that Black men wear that says ‘Respect and protect the Black woman’ and it has an African symbol on it. The contradictions between that cultural concept of protection and being abused is so profound. Then there is a community-level discourse about Black women being sacred, the mules of our community, the strength of our families, which means there’s less room for vulnerability, and that creates another internal contradiction for women who are then assaulted. I think that this matters deeply somehow, and I don’t think that there are many white communities or white families or white women who have that contradiction. They have other contradictions, but they don’t have that particular one, which has a lot to do with whether or not to reach out for help, how long to tolerate the abuse, even to name something as abusive.
At the same time, Black boys are wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Shut-up Bitch’. There’s also the rap music, media-driven hostility towards Black girls which creates another contradiction. Black boys talk about their mothers as sacred and then they batter Black girls who might be the mother of their children. Teasing all this apart is much more complicated, but I actually think that the level of violence that younger Black women are facing is extraordinary, significantly greater than what women of a different generation faced as well as from women in different ethnic groups.
Working with women in prison
Liz Can you talk a little bit about how you began work with women in prison?
Beth There are three things that influenced this current work that I do with women in prison. One is that I was interested in Black feminist theory that would explain identity, social location and none of it addressed women in prison. There was a lot related to work and to sexuality, so I kept wondering what about women in prison as a Black feminist issue? I also became very involved in worrying mostly, and in organising around, the death penalty — being concerned about incarceration rates in general, but also the particular ways that Black people are being incarcerated as a social-service solution often. I really saw the relationship between the erosion of human services in a community and mass incarceration. And again in that discourse there was no room for a gender discussion. Then I started to meet women that I knew from my community when I was going into the jail to do HIV/AIDS education. So I needed to follow the link that had been part of their journey. It’s been transforming in terms of how I understand race and gender politics and class. It’s another part of the rhetoric ‘It can happen to all women’. Battering happens so differently to women who are incarcerated — not the physical assaults, but the negotiation of one’s own autonomy, whether it’s to seek safety or to stay safely. I began thinking we’d done a disservice to low-income women by not treating class as a distinguishing area.
Liz Tell us a little more about what you mean?
Beth Well, again for Black women class has a different meaning — most poor Black women have not depended on men in traditional ways for economic support, and yet the emotional or inter-personal dimensions of their relationship might be very — hegemonic is the word I use. Many of the women who I meet in prison have very idealised notions of relationships with Black men. Their economic work and their emotional work to restabilise Black men is in part to endure their abuse, so that the abuse becomes a way to, not equalise, but privilege men in order to meet this ideological standard of gender relationships. When women and men are deeply interested in that, there are few other things that Black men can do to achieve that except beat Black women, and women think of it in this way. So that has to do with race and class, as closely as gender, not as ‘add-ons’ but really deeply intersected within one person’s experience.
Liz Does this connect to simplistic ways of thinking about ‘empowerment’ because many of the ways I see it used these days is as some form of personal power belonging to the individual which they are entitled to use to benefit themselves, and the fact that this may involve ‘power over’ someone else has become invisible.
Beth Right, that’s the problem. I think about empowerment a little bit differently than most people; to me empowerment is related to critical analysis of one’s own experience and self-reflection. To me it’s a deepening understanding of situational barriers, to see how those are functional for other people than oneself. That isn’t often what people mean by ‘empowerment’ — regrettably, most ideas about it are very individual-focused and not analytical.
New perspectives
Liz Can you talk a little more about the work with women in prison and how it has changed your understanding of violence against women?
Beth There is something about the actual geography of doing work in prisons — every time I leave I am aware I can choose what I have for dinner that night. And I really think about it every day. I always felt respectful of the privilege of safety that I had, but I understand it in such a different way now. So I have this sense of deep obligation, I work so much harder, I feel constantly compelled to do work on behalf of women who are incarcerated. So my life has changed in that I do more work! And I do it urgently, it’s almost — ‘fear’ isn’t the right word — at the same time that I leave knowing I have the privilege, I also know how fragile that is. It has become a deeply personal work, because I’ve been close enough myself, so I have this urgency about saving my own life in a very profound way. I have this identification with the women who are in prison, like no other categorical group that I have ever worked with. That’s partly because they don’t represent categorical work, they represent every woman who tries to figure out how to make sense out of a situation that doesn’t make sense. I often feel any of us are that close (snaps fingers) to being locked up. It’s like, this is what’s illegal now; at any moment anything can be illegal. It’s a terrifying potential, how we administer justice. There have been a few times when I’ve been in the jail and I’ve lost my ID or something and I’ve had to talk my way out, and a few other times I’ve been detained in customs and I’ve tried to describe what I do to negotiate my way out of these points of detention; I realise how even with all the privilege that I have, these systems suck you in and you cannot get out. Arbitrary authority is used, isolation is used, demeaning of people is used — it’s exactly what happens in a battering situation. This whole system is actually terrifying to me. So I feel this urgency to work in my life to change that.
Part of it too is that I work a lot with this sense of people having to make choices about bad options. I am aware of that in my own life, but it is very strong for women in prison; you’re arrested for something you did but there’s a whole lot of other things that you could have been arrested for, and what you were arrested for might not be something that you did, but there were a lot of other things that you could have been arrested for. And I work with that a lot about my own life — if it had been a different time, if I were a different person, if I had been caught I would be there too. Whilst I do not underestimate the class privilege that I would have, I have also met so many people whose class did not protect them.
Liz : In your new book Compelled to Crime you talk about how many of the women you work with in prison have experienced male violence, and that this links in various ways to the reasons they are in prison.
Beth : They embody all of the complexities and failures of our society. They represent public policy failure, they represent fear — the world is afraid of them, as poor Black women. I don’t understand what the fear comes from, but the fear and hatred of them is there. They’ve been failed, they’ve been betrayed over and over again in the public as well as the private sphere of their lives. I think the battered womens’ movement has furthered that. I think our attempts at clemency have said that it takes a better battered woman to deserve our efforts to get her out of prison. Most of the women that I work with aren’t there for assaulting their partner; they’re there for drugs, prostitution, assaulting some other man, failing to protect their kids. I understand in some way why this has happened, but we have so de-contextualised violence from other issues that I think we as advocates have really betrayed the women who have experienced violence and are incarcerated because of it, but don’t fit in whatever legal or policy area we’re working to change. And in that way it reminds of when I first started my work in the battered women’s movement when I used to have to go over and over again, to convince people that racism was an issue, and people would say ‘yes, but…’. It is almost like I’m back there saying ‘we have missed the boat’. Why are we continuing to refuse to take on this issue, there are thousands more battered women in jails and prisons than we recognise. They’ve ended up there because we have not found any other place for them to go, and we’re not organising to get them out!
Liz . In many ways to get where we have we concentrated on stressing women’s strength and survival, and rejected the term ‘victim’ in the process. In doing so I think we lost a way of understanding the many different ways in which women are harmed, the damage that violence does, that women find ways to resist that we don’t understand or recognise, and I wonder if in abandoning that term we have also abandoned women who don’t fit the ‘survivor’ category?
Beth They don’t exist, that’s right. There’s a way that, for good reasons, and through very hard work, we did create this and it’s very hard to uncreate something that we worked hard for. I don’t think what we did was malicious, but our imagination has failed us, we need to de-construct now, to take a different road It means to me that in a lot of ways the anti-violence movement is no longer radical. Because radical politics would have us there working with women in prison. It’s almost like there is no other symbolic, metaphorical place, let alone any agency or institution, where women are so detained, so powerless, so abused… and we’ve sort of said we can’t do that hard work. A very concrete example of it is how we have still failed to open our shelter [refuge] doors to women who are using drugs and alcohol, and so they end up in prison instead of in shelters. I know that addiction is complex, that drugs impair judgement, that alcoholism is tricky, but are we saying we’re only going to work with the easier ones? What does that mean? It’s about the kind of risk we take as a social change movement, whether we locate ourselves in sites of struggle or whether we create this infrastructure of services that requires that we keep our shelter beds full but not full beyond the capacity that we are licensed for. There’s this way we do a dance with people who are fundamentally our enemies. Again it really does take me back to why I started this work, there’s such a hypocrisy in some ways. It’s very hard to be critical of the womens’ movement as someone who’s been a part of it — better me than someone else maybe — but there’s this sense that the whole thing is still fragile enough that all it takes is one peg to be pulled and the whole thing can come tumbling down. And how are we to give honour to the women who’ve saved lives over a long time, but also to be self-critical and say ‘Now we need to find our way back to other sites’.
Challenging feminist orthodoxy
Liz For me it’s about remembering our original vision. My story linked to this is about how when a woman came to a refuge it was about the danger she was in, and providing safety. But now I hear stories about women being asked to leave because a violent man knows she is there, so she’s endangering everybody’s safety. And I want to say ‘wait a minute’!
Beth Right, there’s something fundamentally wrong with that!
Liz I thought the whole idea was that we would create somewhere that she didn’t have to run from, that together we would stand and say ‘no, no more running’, that we removed men’s permission to terrorise women. So there is back-tracking even from that simple basic level.
Beth That’s right, that’s absolutely true, that it is a loss of our original vision. Part of what is really hard and frustrating is that sometimes the vision is still articulated but the practice has departed from it, so it’s difficult to find the place then to enter into a critique. It’s easier to critique those who do this work with a different vision. But, you know the other thing that I’ve learned is that vision really is only practice and that there’s a way of talking about vision that has almost kept us from reality. One of the things I struggle with in my work with incarcerated women is — many of the Black women I talk to who are in jail really want men arrested, they want criminal justice intervention, they want better police, not no police, they want longer sentences. I want to listen to that, yet the more time I spend in jail the more I think ‘This is the worst place for any violent person to go — unless they want to learn more violence’. They learn strategies for violence, but they also learn about the use of arbitrary authority, isolation, how profoundly well it works — because it worked on them. So I’m left with what is the vision then? What is the underlying principle, because the strategy has to come from something.
I was really challenged by the OJ case because I really do believe in defendants’ rights. And then a member of my family was almost killed three months ago by her batterer, and I found myself calling her legal advocate ‘I want the State Attorney’s phone number because I don’t want this man to be given bail’. That’s me and my family and I’m saying lock him up and throw away the key! I thought he should never leave those doors because he is trying to kill her, and he will try to kill her for as long as he can walk this earth. And then, you know, I lobby for reduced sentencing!
Liz These are the contradictions we live with aren’t they? In some circumstances around certain crimes I am prepared to listen to the abolitionist case about prison. But for other crimes, where deliberate damage is done to another person, and a sense of ownership and entitlement is involved, I think the opposite, because in the absence of knowing how to create fundamental change that at least offers protection.
Beth Right. But then how do we develop policy that fits a complex rhetoric? Part of why I pose that question is that this links to my working more closely with the Black community, because I don’t think we can develop national, or even state-wide policy that takes nuance and circumstances into account. Our community has to say: ‘ We will not tolerate intentional violence directed toward another person that’s based on proprietary ownership and entitlement to abuse’ and likewise we will not incarcerate people with the mental health and public health problem of addiction. That shift has to happen in my own community before I can ever expect, really, that there will be public policy that can factor in all of the different nuances and the competing priorities, competing interests that every group has. This is hard, because I don’t think that we should let government off the hook. But, part of what we have done is really turned too much to government to solve this problem. That’s why we are in this trouble that we’re in with mandatory arrest. We’ve expected that law enforcement will solve this problem — and one of the results is that more women are in jail.
One of the ways that we’ve almost reified ‘violence against women’ — thinking about it as a crime and therefore using the apparatus of the criminal justice system to respond — has meant that we have created intervention, public policy, also public sentiment about police enforcement as a response to violence. So when the general public says ‘Why don’t women call the police?’ it is without a consciousness of the tension, the hostility between Black communities and the police enforcement. We also don’t factor in how Black women are deeply concerned about Black men going to prison. Let alone the fact that we don’t have that police response, so it’s not a real option anyway. Again I think it’s an example of how we’ve just taken too narrow a view, and not looked enough at context with the solutions that we’ve tried to come up with. Having said that I do know that many Black women want men to go to jail and stay there, so this is a complicated issue. More and more I think that the answers that make sense to me, may not make sense to someone who stands in a different position.
If we look at national policy, like the recent US Violence Against Women Act, that Act is problematic in so many ways as it affects immigrant women, for example. Yet we have got so committed to passing national legislation that we don’t pay attention to the details. So it becomes a necessary expense to write off the rights of immigrant women toward this greater good of passing the Violence Against Women Act. Again it points to that inconsistency between our values, principles and the reality. And the ways that we’ve gotten involved in these big systems is just unbelievable.
Liz We have also lost sight of where most women get their support from. They get it from their sisters, from friends, from kids, from neighbours, or they don’t get it from them. But if they do it makes a significant difference. The focus on government means we haven’t looked that much at how we enable those close to women to be more effective.
Beth That’s right, and I’ve actually been inspired by the ways that now there are national campaigns to create community intolerance for violence… both the Zero Tolerance initiative, but also the Family Violence Prevention Fund in the US. But I also think that there’s still a sense of some monolithic community; that one message that’s supposed to be for everybody. I just don’t know how well that works. So again the well-intended efforts to make things work on a national level — whether it’s to draft legislation or create community intolerance doesn’t work without community-specific messages and interventions. The movement came up with that idea years ago but we’re not the ones who design a national message to suit our community and assume that it would apply to everyone — but that is what is happening with those national campaigns. In the Black community right now in major urban areas like New York there is a tension in terms of relating to the Youth Firearms Prevention folks who have a very radical race analysis — typically — but no analysis of gender whatsoever. And so that’s a community ally that we’re trying to influence, in a way that we’re not working with the white mainstream of the battered womens’ movement, but that’s OK, I think maybe it’s a more appropriate alliance anyway.
Misuse of powerlessness
Liz I was really interested in how you used the concept of misuse of powerlessness between those who share oppressions.
Beth Caitlin Fulward, who was one of the first chairs of the Women of Colour Taskforce in the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, like many of those early activist veterans has gone on to do other work; she’s worked a lot with HIV/AIDS and developed one of the largest People of Colour Against AIDS networks in the United States. It’s from there that she began to think really critically about: how is it that we use a critical understanding of our oppression? Do we use it to shift consciousness and become activists and allies or do we use it to disguise or excuse away our own lack of taking responsibility for our stuff? This is a hard one to talk about publicly — it’s different than internalised racism, and internalised racism is a problematic concept in some ways, because it does imply some psychological conceptualisation of internalisation. This more says that we understand powerlessness or we understand oppression and what we choose to do with it is not in our own best interests or in the interests of people who are similarly oppressed as we are. I think it’s a great concept because it implies that we can make a different choice and without going through some psychological process of exorcising our internal angst. And I think it also sheds light on the ways that powerlessness really fucks with people, that people get backed into corners that they don’t know how to get out of, and one of the ways they do that is come out on the wrong side sometimes.
Liz I think of it in connection to the necessity of creating positive senses of identity in the context of external negative definitions, but in the process forgetting that oppression doesn’t necessarily make anyone a nice person.
Beth That’s right, or a sympathetic person, or one who’s politically clear, it gives room for that range of responses to that trauma, if you will.
Liz The other thing you made me think about was the idea of agency which there is so much emphasis on now in feminist theory, but agency seems to only mean that we have to choose to act, there is very little recognition of the vastly different contexts in which women are able to act.
Beth One of the ways that it gets played out is the victim survivor/ offender defendant set of categories that we’ve set up for women to try to fit into. From working with women in prison it’s very clear to me that women make choices — but they don’t have good options and they don’t have free will; clearly they don’t have free will, but they’re not passive recipients or only vessels of despair. And they integrate that, sort it out and then choose a path that they think they can actually go on. So they exercise agency, they’re are not without some kind of self-determination. Sometimes they intentionally commit crimes, in response to being battered. The problem is that we don’t have systems that allow you to be two things — a victim and an offender — so instead we’ve asked women to only be one thing, and relate to agency in only in one way. Our interventions are so categorical, overly determined, that we can’t accommodate a lot of women’s realities. So we either say women are offenders and therefore need these services or women are victims and they need these services without seeing that probably most are both. When you follow that to a logical extreme, in the case, I think of young Black men who are perpetrators — they are also victims. Increasingly we know this. And that means that our whole fundamental analysis has to be shaken up, because do we then say ‘Well, the victimisation of women is more important than the victimisation of boys when they are children’? Do we want to fit men as victims into our analysis? Quite frankly I don’t, but it is a logical extension if we take this argument all the way.
That sort of brings me to something that I’ve been thinking about in terms of what kind of analysis we use to base our intervention on. And I’m less convinced that we need an analysis that is totally consistent, or that has sort of multi-level integrity. In other words, I think that we need to think of women as perpetrators and victims, as offenders and survivors, but I don’t think that means that we have to offer services to men just because they can be both of those things too.
Liz And we defend that as a political choice rather than in terms of theoretical consistency?
Beth Yes, indeed. It’s so interesting now having an identity as an academic, I really do think of myself as a methodologist and I’m very interested in theory. But that’s not why I do this work, you know. I think that as more and more of us are positioned to contribute to scholarship and influence the literature we have to also be clear when we’re doing political work. Not that academic work is not political work but it’s really very different, the arguments I would make for theoretical consistency I would not make for political choices.
Working with complexity
Liz All the way through this conversation you’ve been talking about how feminists need to be able to deal with complexity, but also how complicated that can be. Your response to the Million Man March [Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, called in early 1996 for a million Black men to march on Washington, to make a statement about Black masculinity in terms of responsibility to their families] — was an interesting example of this.
Beth Well I was sitting in Chicago, immersed in the politics of Black community development, trying to influence that work to have a gender analysis, aligning with men that I never thought I’d ever align with. The Million Man March almost came along to say ‘see Beth — this is why you can’t do it.’ And ‘This is why you can’t do it’ meant: how do you offer constant critique of black patriarchy that demonstrates understanding of the plight of Black men in contemporary society as different but not necessarily worse than the situation facing Black women. How do you articulate all of this? Do you stand, as a raced woman, on the side of these men trying to do something? Or do you risk feeding the white feminist, and progressive white critique of the march — are you used as an agent of theirs, because they all would love to say ‘Oh, there’s some Black women who don’t agree’. Where do you find yourself? Initially, like many other women, I was silent, I just could not figure out a way in to this debate. Then I found more women who thought like I did, there were Black feminists who spoke out publicly, and surrounding them was a whole group of women who said ‘I’m not going to be forced into this corner, I will not choose between a gender analysis and feeling like I’m part of a black community’. I don’t think we did it that successfully — we got some press, and some sense that we were not totally weird. But we did not touch women in the same way that the Million Man March did. It really called us together — we still meet and talk about this; part of what we didn’t do is have accessible material and accessible arguments that have strongly articulated ideology. Louis Farrakhan had pamphlets that were attractive, that were easily accessible, that reflected people’s experience; deeply steeped in ideology of the Nation of Islam. We don’t have that deeply steeped in Black feminism, and we need to do that; our popular education has not been up to par, and to me that was popular education at its best, it was brilliant organising, national organising. We could only respond and our white feminist sisters and the progressive group of men behind them tried to exploit us, tried to get us to join their gender critique.
Some of our best Black men who were feminist allies joined the Million Man March. It emotionally and politically shook us up to a point where we said ‘We have to do something’. Which is why we’re still meeting to try and figure out how to do popular education, on this issue. In that sense I sort of feel grateful. I also really remember that day, it was such an awful day for me. And I remember thinking the best I can hope is that some battered women are safer because their husbands or partners went to that march, and I thought that maybe some of them will pay their child support when they get home, and maybe there’ll be a chance for women-only space, for productive discussions for women. I kept trying to find these glimpses of hope. I talked with men who I think were really changed by it, that made it more complicated. It did enough good that I’d say it wasn’t all bad. I wish I could say it was terrible, it was all bad — but it wasn’t. The way the white media responded to it was so overtly racist that the racial dimension of it just jumped forward. I’ve often thought since if it was now and I knew what it was going to be like, would I go and protest? I still wouldn’t but I would still try and articulate how wrong it was. They’re planning a Million Family March in October which to me is just as troubling, just as problematic because their notion of ‘family’ is so — I’d rather it just be men in some ways because then the critique is more apparent, than hidden under the ideology of family; because it’s really patriarchy.
Liz And women are only there as part of ‘family’, they’re not allowed to be there as women.
Beth That’s right.
Liz How do you see Black feminism in the United States, where it’s got to and where it’s going?
Beth I see a parallel between my evolving consciousness as a Black feminist, rather than a woman of colour, and what’s happening with Black feminism. Even in terms of where intellectual opportunities are created now, they are much more culturally specific. I think that’s a good thing, journals look more for specific articles, conferences focus much more on specific groups. It’s actually widened who can be a Black feminist, because it’s not melded with so many other issues — I love that. It feels to me a place where I really can be all my identities. The ‘woman of colour’ category did offer more opportunity for blending, whilst this is much more specific but really about me, in some ways very self-interested but also with a sharpness to it. I’ve changed how I am because of how Black feminism has continued to grow, evolve, clarify, define, shape its way. The fact that there’s some very well-established well-respected Black feminists who really articulate theoretical issues helps. I was having a conversation with Barbara Smith recently, of Kitchen Table Press, and I was saying ‘ Barbara, where’s Kitchen Press? What happened to that major institution that just changed womens’ lives?’ And she explained where it is, it’s doing alright; it’s going to publish again soon, but it’s without its edge. Black feminism was such a popular movement, as opposed to an intellectual movement, and it feels in some ways more intellectual now than popular and that’s troubling to me. There are so many women who remembered reading Home Girls and felt like life opened up for them. Very different to reading Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins’s book, some people had their world open up, but it was not popular. I hope there’s a way to make it popular again. It’s similar to the Million Man March — how do we make sure that those of us who get really excited about theory have that, and how do we make sure that people who don’t get so excited about that have something else to get excited about? Black feminism can transcend the boundaries between intellectual life and real life, community life much more easily than other things. We’ve yet to do it very well, but it’s got to be our next step.
References
Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Unwin Hyman, 1990).
Beth Ritchie Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered Black Women (Routledge, 1996).
Barbara Smith (ed) Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Kitchen Table Press, 1983).